Understanding the Process

Light — sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight — existed long before humans considered it a “design element.” From whale oil lamps to LEDs, designed light has only been a recent addition to the long timeline of human existence. It's crucial, however, to remember that all light is natural, though we now harness and produce it through advanced technology. Given this history, it's no surprise that light can evoke a wide array of emotional responses and invoke memories. This is something Burya genuinely believes and understands.

"A client might share, ‘One of my core memories is sitting on the beach by a campfire, feeling the warmth on my face and body while my back remains cold,’” says Burya. “This sparks further questions: Is there a specific smell? A taste? What other elements are tied to that memory? Why separate those design elements when they can all work together to create a cohesive experience?”

“We then consider ways to turn these idyllic memories and desires into reality,” Burya continues. He explains that the process they use to create the desired result isn’t about fixtures or keypads so much as it is the more elemental human relationship of living with light. “Understanding and expressing light is our gift to design,” he says. “This is especially challenging when you realize that light is invisible.

“You need to understand what it will do when you release it.”

The Smart Home

What Burya is driving at can also be applied to other aspects of a true home technology integration: a holistic experience that’s more than the sum of its parts.

“What David is expressing is something we’ve long believed: that there’s something truly transformative that can happen when the right design professionals are working in concert with our integrators,” says JoAnn Arcenal, Crestron’s director of business development. “For example: It’s one thing to have distributed audio — the potential to have music anywhere in the home — but it’s quite another to have a home that understands what music one might like when, precisely where, and at what volume.”

To have that perfect aural element — being enveloped in J.S. Bach or John Coltrane as lighting, shading, climate, and more all turn a home into a truly personalized refuge — is yet another part of something that can become utterly transcendent. “David has put into words what the discovery process should yield: a space that is so finely tuned to an individual or a family that they feel as if it is reciprocal to their desire — and they never want to leave.”

Practical Applications

To put all this into concrete terms — to get those concepts into practical applications — Burya explains to his clients that he’s not so much a designer as a confidant. “I told one client that I first needed to gain his trust,” he says. “And once that occurred, I learned the light he really desired was cinematic — even film noir. He wanted to create the light that he reminisced about from the films Citizen Kane and La Dolce Vita. The design challenge was to develop a way to express the personalities of all the acts or performances of the movies while being intuitive.” 

“Considering the range of possibilities in the lighting design — and the need to set each scene like a director — we developed a custom rotary keypad allowing for 16 presets to be selected simply by turning the knob, something made possible by properly implementing Crestron and DMX technology,” Burya explains. “It was a completely custom creation that ostensibly appeared as an old-school rotary dimmer made from oil-rubbed bronze, and when it was finished, it had precisely the connection he’d sought between the desired environments and intuitive operation; you turn the knob and watch the room come to life.”

The control element was key, as Burya notes: “An engraved 16-button keypad could handle the same function, but at the cost of frustrating the client instead of responding to the client.” It speaks to Burya’s core tenets. “Design is the distiller by which technology becomes an intuitive liberator. Often, I hear the client requesting simplicity while simultaneously holding an iPhone. The expression, ‘Keep it simple, stupid,’ ultimately ends with stupid and gets at the heart of the problem.”

Telling a Story in Light

Burya recalls another installation in which a client wanted to highlight an original Picasso — a sculpture of incalculable value. “He wanted to only light the sculpture — nothing else,” Burya says. “By carefully masking bits and pieces of the light emanating from four projectors, we were able to illuminate the artwork and nothing else: Not the pedestal, not the floor, not the walls nearby.

“Designers need a real renaissance approach. The designer must deliver the art by understanding the science.”

Creating precisely these types of one-of-a-kind solutions is something that every home technology professional recognizes, especially those who work with clients at the highest end of the economic spectrum. And the uniqueness of each solution informs another aspect of Burya’s — and Tirschwell’s — process: “One of our core aspirational values is to never repeat our previous successes. Replication and repetition have high value in engineering — let’s just not call that design. Each client has a story we need to tell in light.”

A Deeper Understanding

JoAnn Arcenal agrees. “Our most successful integrators are our most inventive,” she says. The home automation industry has always had the “heart of a hacker” — like Burya, who will take apart a fixture to rework it for a solution, the individuals who wanted to learn how to calibrate television sets for a given environment had to take the things apart and noodle with the TV’s guts. That fundamental drive can translate into an understanding of the need for individual customizations — there’s no simple bag of tricks; there’s a drive to make the machine fit its user, no matter what.

“The integrators who work with our highest-end clients — and their designers and architects — have processes to help them gain a very complete understanding of the wants and needs of the people who will be using that space every day,” says Arcenal. There’s no “one size fits all” solution when one’s customizing a smart home to fit a family or individual.

“To paraphrase David’s point, if you want to create a perfect solution for a client, you have to abandon your assumptions and start from scratch every time,” she notes.

The Presentation Process

Burya and his team avoid two-dimensional renderings or computer simulations of the lighted spaces they’re designing. “Our primary method is to build physical models of the ideas and have the client experience these in person,” says Burya. His metaphor for that process: “It’s the difference between seeing a picture of a pool and dipping your toe in a pool. People aspire to experience a sunset, not a downlight.”

“So many firms are moving to 3-D computer simulations and using images they can find online to represent their ideas. We build models with lights that dim, in miniature or at full scale,” he explains. “By building everything in the beginning, the client knows what the design feels like, and they then co-create the design with us — waiting until construction administration is underway is a terrible time to build a mock-up and find out the design is not what the client wants and has already paid for.”

That real-world illustration takes us back to an earlier point that Burya made — it’s critical for a high-end client to really feel how light will impact a space that exists in three dimensions. First and foremost, a computer screen is its own light source, and that rendering will have inaccuracies. “Most people insist they can see light,” says Burya. “They tell me they can see the sun, for example, but what they’re really seeing is nuclear fusion and matter.”

“You don't see light traveling through space. You can't see light. You can only see it when it interacts with something. To quote one of my design mentors and professors, Howard Brandston, ‘If light touches it, it is my responsibility.’”

Understanding the Tech — and Control

“When I started in lighting, my then-boss Paul Marantz used to walk through the studio with a basket of bulbs and challenge the designers to identify bases, shapes, and sources,” says Burya. Things are entirely different now. “The designer now needs to understand protocols, constant current versus constant voltage, wiring topology, and many other aspects to be intuitive and high-value.” That’s where the model-building aspect of the Tirschwell process is especially useful: Even the most junior designer needs to be able to turn concepts into practical, operational designs.

“I might be asked about a detail and if it is right or if it will work,” says Burya. “My response to that designer is: ‘What do you want to see? If you know, build it and prove it.’”

Burya’s on a mission to bring control up to date — and align it with current technology. “I’ve seen too many projects that embrace LED technology from 2024 but are controlled by systems that belong in 1974, so it’s no wonder the results are disappointing.” He’s constantly striving to create control solutions that are as powerful and high-performing as they are intuitive.

Crestron is an exceptional collaborator in this regard, says Burya. “Crestron has a more robust non-proprietary open architecture than others, which makes them a ‘go-to’ solution,” he says. “Crestron has a native ability to work with DALI and DMX. We use digital protocols to save money, improve, and minimize the wiring infrastructure.”

“For example, we can take a design that might require up to a dozen panels and get better performance only using one panel. By designing with those advanced protocols, we’re keeping the architects happy: They need to reserve fewer spaces for those panels and their cooling infrastructure.”

Ultimately, though, all that technical knowledge is a means to an end, an end that every architect, designer, and integrator recognizes: A client who’s been “shown the light,” pardon the pun. Burya sums it up with the restructuring of a quote that’s been misattributed to Leonardo DaVinci:

“What they never knew existed,
“What they never knew they wanted,
“Now they cannot live without.”